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profit

Weeks after Twitter rolled out a suite of new customer service tools for businesses using the social network to connect with clients, the company has come out with a not-at-all-shocking report that interacting with customers on Twitter is good for business. Flabbergasted? Probably not. [More]

Last week, when Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told a congressional panel that her company only makes $50 profit per EpiPen — the emergency allergy treatment that has risen in price by 600% in recent years — lawmakers found that hard to believe. And now that Mylan has revised that profit figure to $80 per EpiPen, the company’s critics are only getting louder. [More]

Comcast may be a provider of TV and internet services, but at its heart it’s in the exact same business as literally every business: making profit. Bringing in more money without spending more money is the tried-and-true way of making profit, so that’s exactly what Comcast wants to do. And their planned way of doing it involves charging consumers more for the internet they already use, and then adding some more on top of that, too. [More]

Big news! AIG, poster child of the economic meltdown, has reported a profit. The company says it had a net income for the second quarter of $1.8 billion, which is much better than in 2008 when it lost $5.8 billion. So, how much did we-the-people get for our investment? $1.5 billion.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and his partners are some cool cats. Facebook tried to buy the company for half a billion and they turned it down. The fledgling social networking service also staved off Google from gobbling it up.

Best-practices guru Joel Spolsky thinks Circuit City imploded because of their terrible customer service, not any “recession” or “macroeconomic conditions” nonsense. To prove his point, he looks at thriving New York electronics retailer B&H, which succeeds because they understand that stellar service leads to healthy profit margins.

Consumers are cutting back — and the AP says that shoppers are abandoning Target for even cheaper stores. In addition, Target’s credit card division is running into trouble as shell-shocked shoppers aren’t able to pay their bills.

Did you know that gas price gouging almost never occurs as prices rise? Rather, it’s most often when dealers keep prices artificially high even as their costs fall. As gas costs were near $5 a gallon until falling and oil companies earn around $100 billion each year, it’s a good time to question what really goes into the price of gas. The numbers on the gas station sign hide a complex set of transactions. Before gas can power your car, it must be discovered as crude oil, traverse three markets, and be refined from crude into gas. Inside, we’ll explain the three markets, walk you through the role of refineries, and show how oil companies use creative tactics to manipulate gas prices…

“Burger King Holdings Inc., the world’s second-largest hamburger chain, said Tuesday that quarterly earnings rose a better-than-expected 40 percent as an Xbox 360 video game promotion spurred sales in the U.S.”